I've got a project that consists of a fairly high-speed signal driver. But the rest of the application really doesn't need anything fancy. In other words, the rest of the application could use a very cheap\standard 8051. So in my mind, I have two options:

1) Use a very high speed 8051 for the application. Not even sure if I can find an 8051 that provides enough speed within tolerance. If not, I would need to use something like a ARM?

2) Use a cheap\standard 8051 for the application and implement the actual signal timing off-chip. I haven't decided how I would\could do this yet.

So, I'm hoping that you guys may be able to provide some advice\experience that might help me make up my mind.

Basically, the "high-speed" signal looks similar to this:


There are about 10 different timing variations that I will need to support. The pulse and burst timings are what changes, amplitude does not. The amplitude is TTL levels. The fastest burst period might be in the realm of 200nS.

How would you implement this? Is it possible (short of something like an FPGA) to implement this in non-complex hardware controlled by a cheap\standard 8051?

Thanks for the advice in advance
Tomas